Thursday, May 29, 2014

Johnny Manziel has been a
member of the Cleveland Browns, an unsigned member at that, for about 5
minutes.And yet in that brief period of
time he’s managed to illustrate exactly why he was the most complicated, most
confounding player to enter the NFL draft in years, maybe ever.

So much of Manziel is wrapped
up in myth making, most of which is self-induced.He’s not the first athlete focused on his
brand, he’s just the latest.But what
will continue to make Manziel the source of much agita for Cleveland fans is
simply that he’s at best a difficult fit with the region’s sensibilities.That doesn’t mean he can’t be successful
here.It just means it will be a trying
experience.

Cleveland specifically and
the Midwest generally have a culture and a view.It’s often labeled with the term “blue collar”
but that term has lost so much of its meaning and resonance.Still, Clevelanders will tolerate a
significant amount of bullshit in the pursuit of a winner but they will not
tolerate being mocked for their values.Hard work and sincerity are as highly valued as results, maybe more so.Clevelanders to their credit and detriment will
suffer earnest losers more easily than arrogant winners.Whether he wins or loses Manziel, unchanged,
will struggle with a fan base that would rather just love him than hate to love
him.

You can and many have written
unending paragraphs dissecting Manziel’s antics including his recent weekend
trip to Las Vegas and his arrogant response to those who question his work
ethic.It is true, certainly, that there
is a time for work and a time for play.That’s as understood as well in Cleveland as anywhere else.But there is an order to it and right now, Clevelanders
are rightfully asking, as did virtually every NFL personnel type in every draft
room, whether Manziel understands that proper order.

I don’t think Manziel won
over any new fans by acting outraged at the questions being asked about his
commitment to his craft.Lacking perhaps
the personal warmth to respond sincerely he did what most immature young adults
do these days, he took to Instagram.He tweeted
pictures of his Cleveland Browns iPad and playbook to establish what exactly,
that he looked them over on the plane?That he studied a few plays between Moscow Mules?

Manziel sees himself as
unique but that’s part of his naiveté.There
is nothing new under the sun, just a repackaging of all that’s come before
him.It was just a few years ago when
Dallas quarterback Tony Romo was jetting off to Mexico with Jessica Simpson during
the Cowboys’ playoff bye week.The
timing of the trip was rightly questioned and his critics’ ire fueled when the
Cowboys flamed out in the playoffs.Romo
said virtually the same things Manziel is saying now.He’s young.He’s entitled to relax.He can
study in Mexico, with Simpson draped on his arm, just as easily as he could in
his home in Dallas.All true,
theoretically.Again, though, time and
place.Sometimes you have to just read
the room.

What it came down to with
Romo is what it comes down to with Manziel, as it does with any other player.Is he willing to really put in the work
necessary to be an elite in the NFL.The
fact that this was the most significant question about Manziel before the
draft, one would think he would have tried to answer it more forcefully than he
has thus far. Indeed he seems hell bent on demonstrating what’s true in the
movies only, that Seth Rogan comedies can coexist with Darron Aronofsky dramas.

Romo more or less learned
from his mistake and thereafter has courted a lower profile.No coincidentally his work ethic stopped
being questioned.But Romo isn’t even
the best example for Manziel to follow.That would be Tom Brady.

Peter King, in this week’s
Monday Morning Quarterback, interviewed Brady.When the 2014 season opens, Brady will be 37 years old.To a great extent he has nothing more to
prove as a quarterback.He’s already a
prominent player in the conversation of greatest NFL quarterback of all
time.He also is married to someone who
is a prominent player in the conversation of the world’s most beautiful
women.He attends his fair share of
celebrity events in service of his wife.

What Brady knows and what
Manziel still has time to learn is balance.Brady spends most of his offseason working to improve as a quarterback
and ensuring that he’ll be able to withstand the rigors of a NFL season.

The money quote from
Brady:“I’m not here to be king of the
weight room. I do things to make me a better quarterback, whatever they are.
Does it work? You be the one to judge. Watch me play. Then draw your own conclusions.”

That’s the point, isn’t it?Manziel
is young and gifted but with a huge learning curve ahead of him.Will he be willing to do the things to make
himself a better quarterback? The results will speak for themselves with others
able to draw their own conclusions.

The other thing that struck about Brady’s interview was the passion that
burns within, even at this age, to keep working.Brady said that it’s his love for the game
that motivates him to get up at 5 a.m. on a random Thursday in May to work
out.But it’s more.He also said that he still works on his
throwing mechanics with his coach because he was the 199th pick in
the draft for a reason and thus he has to be sure he is as efficient as
possible with his mechanics.

Jack Nickaus, in his Golf My Way book and in countless interviews over the
years, talked about his routine entering each golf season.He said he starts at the beginning by working
on his grip, his stance and his alignment.Even with all the success he had on the golf course he knew that little
inefficiencies creep into your game from time to time and if unchecked
compound.

Ben Hogan, who fought a persistent hook, would spend hours upon hours
hitting golf balls trying to perfect his swing and his ball flight.He had a saying, “the secret is in the dirt.”In other words, the only way to get better is
to work at getting better.

Truthfully, we don’t know much about Johnny Football’s work ethic but there
are some bright red flags at the moment.Manziel is constantly defending his commitment to football because most
of what the average person now knows about him is from outlets such as TMZ
instead of Sports Illustrated.His moves
off the field, the pictures he takes, the way he’s portrayed are very
calculated.He’s good time Johnny and he
wants you to know there’s nothing wrong with it.Until he plays and produces or fails, that’s
all we’ll really know.

This will all work itself out eventually.Browns fans would like to think the team drafted the next Brady or the
next Peyton Manning but that’s neither Manziel’s wont nor his temperament at
the moment.A big part of it is simply
that Manziel doesn’t yet know what he doesn’t know.He’s never been through a NFL season.Indeed he’s never been just another player in
a league full of established stars.The
NFL comes easy to no one but Manziel will hardly be the first or last player to
think otherwise.

The secret is in the dirt and the classroom and wherever else the likes of
Brady, Manning, Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers and the league’s other elite quarterbacks
find it.Manziel will either find it in
the same way or he won’t and the truth will eventually be revealed.He can’t scramble his way to competence but
he can scramble his way to irrelevance.And
if that’s the road he ends up traveling because brand cultivation and
management become his priorities, then what he’ll find is that all that was for
naught.If there’s anything that TMZ or
the bikini clad princesses of Vegas care less about than a has been quarterback
is a never was quarterback.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Dan Gilbert is clever, you have to give him that.Early in his career as the owner of the
Cleveland Cavaliers he came across as the prototypical meddling owner who had
made money in one line of business and figured that genius translated into the
world of sports.To fans, Gilbert was a
huge red flag, a combination of Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones.

At some point Gilbert became sensitive or at least aware of the
impression that was developing. He toned down the act, seemingly turning his
attention away from the Cavs and more toward becoming the Moe Green of the
Midwest.Turns out, that perception was
the deceiving one.

Behind the more stealth look that Gilbert crafted beats the
heart of an owner whose goals are simply amorphous platitudes about winning and
excellence that cannot be achieved because he lacks the temperament to reach
them.

In his 9 years as owner of the Cavs, Gilbert has had 3
general managers and four head coaches.Let that roll around the inside of your head for a moment.Three general managers and four head coaches
in 9 years.

That’s almost the exact trajectory of the Cleveland Browns,
easily the worst run sports franchise in the last 20 years.Gilbert’s lay low approach of the last few
years belies an impetuousness and an incompetency that rivals that of Randy
Lerner.The reason it gets less
attention is that the Cavs are and always will be third in the hearts and minds
of Cleveland sports fans.Most simply don’t
care.

When you’re running a private business with no outside shareholders,
the public results are harder to discern.For all anyone knows or cares, Gilbert chews through vice presidents at Quicken
Loans at the same rate he chews through executives and coaches at the
Cavs.That doesn’t matter.What does is that the Cavs’ business is in
the public eye and at the nearly 10-year mark of Gilbert’s ownership, the
picture isn’t pretty.

Gilbert has shown no greater competence than the Gund
brothers before him. The Cavs under Gilbert have been transcendent only when
they had a transcendent player that fell into his lap.When the planets realigned, the franchise
became decidedly non-transcendent, again.Gilbert isn’t just the figurehead on which to level the blame.He’s the perpetrator and instigator of a
highly dysfunctional and withering franchise that is still years away, at best,
from being any sort of contender and then only if something dramatic happens at
the top.

Undoubtedly Gilbert would like the team to be a
success.It would certainly help bring
in more people to his downtown casino during the winter months if the Cavs were
contenders and Quicken Loans arena was sold out 41 times during the cold
Cleveland winter.But the Cavs aren’t
successful under Gilbert, except around the fringes.Gilbert, the only one in the franchise with
actual power to wield, is the only consistent piece remaining in place these
last nearly 10 years.It’s easy to see
where the buck stops and the blame lies.

The NBA is, without question, the hardest league in which to
construct a champion.That may seem
counterintuitive given the relatively small rosters when compared to baseball
and football, but the numbers don’t lie.When a team is down it stays down for years.A shallow pool of new, NBA-ready talent each
year and a salary cap riddled with exceptions are the primary reasons.

As a result, the league at any given time has essentially 3
groups of teams.The top group is the
very small handful of teams with enough talent to actually threaten for a
championship.Teams in this group
feature at least one super duper star and enough almost super duper stars to
give them the depth to survive the grind that is the NBA playoffs.The Miami Heat and the San Antonio Spurs are
two obvious examples.

The middle group is the larger group of playoff teams
looking to get into the top group.The
group has its own hierarchy.There are
the teams that just squeak into the playoffs, usually with losing records, which
is the equivalent of NBA purgatory because it’s very difficult for those teams
to improve without outside help.The
draft is a non-event for them so they improve, if at all, somewhat organically
but mostly by prying free agents away from other teams. Then there are the
teams on the higher end of this group that seem on the precipice of getting
into the top group.Think Oklahoma City,
maybe Indiana.Some make it, some
regress. Much depends on organic growth
or the pick up of a missing piece here or there.Either
way it’s still a slog.

The bottom group are, naturally, the bottom feeders.When a team enters this group it is a minimum
of 10 years before it can even get to the upper level of the middle group, let
alone membership in the top group.You
can look at virtually every former playoff team in recent history that
thereafter entered this group.It is 10
years before they get back into the playoffs.

The Cavs, for a brief period, were a top group team because
they had the league’s best player.But
for a variety of reasons, some having to do with LeBron James’ psychological
profile and some having to do with Gilbert’s, the Cavs couldn’t hold on to
James.In retrospect, they weren’t
really even in the conversation.Once
James left the Cavs dropped to a bottom feeding team and there they remain.While James is pushing the Heat to a third
straight NBA title, the Cavs can’t even seem to work their way up to membership
in the middle group.Gilbert’s meddling
is the primary reason.

It’s actually quite fascinating that Gilbert can’t seem to
learn from the bad examples in front of him all the evils that visit a
franchise when it constantly reboots.The Browns’ are a mere few miles away and dominate the local papers and
talk radio stations.Gilbert must be in
some serious denial about his own track record to think he’s not that kind of
owner even as he goes about his business every day proving that he is.

Here’s the dangerous game in all of this.You can make a case, perhaps even a
compelling case, for each of the moves that Gilbert has made in his 9
years.It might have been a mistake, as
Gilbert said last year, to fire Mike Brown the first time, but it also was an
obvious mistake to hire him the second time.The two concepts can coexist.But
that is seeing the trees and ignoring the forest.Gilbert’s track record, irrespective of how
compiled, is that of a meddling owner who can’t be satisfied. Why would a
gifted free agent, let alone James, ever want to get involved in this mess?The same goes for a gifted coach.

So much of what’s been happening is that Gilbert can’t land
on a general manager he trusts long enough to let a direction, any direction,
of the club take hold.It is exactly why
the Browns are the mess they are.Gilbert, like Jimmy Haslam now and Lerner before that, falls in and out
of love quickly with his management hires, but not quickly enough to avoid the
damage done.Gilbert wants to win but
deep pockets and force of will aren’t enough.It takes temperament and discipline and at least in this business
venture Gilbert falls short.

Anyone who watched the jumble that was the Cavs last season
completely understands why the season ended as it did.That jumble was the most visible
manifestation of all the dysfunction, impatience and impetuousness of the
ownership and management team.A new,
permanent general manager and a coach of his own choosing could help on the
margins.But real, permanent change for the
better isn’t going to be achieved until everyone in this franchise can stop
looking over their shoulders in fear at what Gilbert might do next.

Friday, May 09, 2014

It’s always nice when a team like the Cleveland Browns gets
the player it really wants in the NFL draft.Who knew that player was Justin Gilbert?

Bouncing around the first round like he was a combination of
Butch Davis and Eric Mangini, Browns general manager Ray Farmer certainly made
things interesting for the fan base.And
when Farmer traded back up to only then draft Gilbert you could hear the loud
sucking sound throughout Northeast Ohio.Fans once again felt their usual abandonment as another general manager
used the 8th pick in the draft to select the 16th best
player.

But things ultimately broke Farmer’s way and through another
bounce he was able to grab Johnny Freakin’ Football with the most cursed slot
of the draft for quarterbacks, 22nd.That was the home of such previous notables as Brady Quinn and Brandon
Weeden, and also J.P. Losman.

When the dust cleared, the Browns had a new cornerback and a
new, potentially franchising shifting quarterback in Manziel.For all the jumping around Farmer did it’s
hard not to shake the notion that simply staying put could have, likely would
have, resulted in the exact same picks.The advantage, and this is actually significant, is that for all that
movement the Browns not only ended up where they would have any way without it but
they essentially stole Buffalo’s first pick in next year’s draft for what
amounts to a couple of extra later round picks.It was a mild version of the movie Draft Day.

In that context, Farmer had a good, if lucky, night on
Thursday and, frankly, it’s about time someone associated with the Browns had a
lucky night.It wouldn’t surprise at
this point if the other shoe dropped and owner Jimmy Haslam found himself
indicted on Friday.The Gods never give
to Cleveland what they can’t otherwise extract at a higher cost.

There’s a lot to like about Manziel.Most of it is intangible and if there is one
thing that most NFL general managers and even coaches hate is taking a player
whose intangible qualities are greater than his physical attributes.It’s exactly the reason that Jacksonville
drafted Blake Bortles instead of Manziel.Bortles is built like Ben Roethlisberger and is better looking.Jacksonville went all in on that combination
and we’ll see whether it was justified or whether Bortles will be the kind of
guy who, in two years, is trolling for backup spots in Dallas like Weeden.

There’s no way to know Manziel’s real upside as a NFL
quarterback until he gets under center week after week.Weeden never lost the deer-in-the-headlights
look.Tim Couch had his spirit
broken.The game just moved too fast for
Brady Quinn and Colt McCoy.

In some ways, many actually, Manziel reminds me of Brian
Sipe, another relatively weak armed, undersized quarterback whose greater gifts
were mental.There are ways to overcome
a lack of size in the NFL and Manziel certainly carries himself as the kind of
player who can overcome his lack of size.Drew Brees was in a similar position.If Manziel even ends up as a better version of Sipe then the pick will
have been justified, particularly in context of all the other blown first round
picks over the years.

But the dark cloud hanging over Johnny Football is whether
he ends up as more of a Mike Phipps.There’s an old story about Phipps that former Browns head coach Blanton
Collier liked to tell.When Phipps was
drafted, Collier, who had retired, was brought back as a consultant to help
school Phipps and get him ready for the NFL.Collier was an offensive genius with a knack for quarterbacks.He was everything that Mike Holmgren wanted
to be.

Collier worked Phipps out and gave him the benefit of hour
after hour of classroom instruction.When the schooling ended several days later, Collier asked to looked at
the notepad he had given Phipps at the beginning of their sessions.Collier wanted to review the notes Phipps had
taken.When Collier opened the notebook,
it was blank.Phipps hadn’t written a
thing.It was at that moment, with
Phipps still a long way from playing his first game, that Collier knew the
Browns had made a mistake.

Which way will Manziel go?Will he be an engaged student or the know-it-all jock with the attention
span of a puppy?There’s no good way to
know before the draft because it can’t be measured. Jon Gruden’s quarterback school is hardly a
benchmark.It’s a made for television
farce that by design offers little insight about the player while extolling the
perceived genius of Gruden. Manziel’s
heart will get measured from about this point forward as head coach Mike
Pettine and offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan figure out just what they got
in Manziel.

The other thing about Manziel, and this is hardly news but
still remains worth mentioning, is that his lack of size and lack of build is
still a detriment in a league of physical freaks.Manziel may be able to move around better
than, say, Bortles, but he won’t be able to absorb the same kind of hits.In other words, the chances of Manziel coming
out of any season without at least one separated shoulder seems remote.Pray that it’s his non-throwing shoulder.

Manziel proved himself to be a playmaker in college, not
just once but several times over.If
there’s one thing that the Browns have lacked for most of their 2.0 existence
is playmakers of any kind.Manziel seems
to have a knack for stepping in shit and coming out smelling like a rose.For most of the Browns 2.0 existence when a
player’s stepped in shit he rarely can get his foot dislodged let alone get the
stink out of his jersey.

As for the drafting of Gilbert, I’m skeptical.It was a reach and in exactly the most awful
way possible.Pettine said that Gilbert
was the best corner for the Browns’ scheme.Uh oh.When a team as perennially
awful as the Browns and with more holes to fill than a city crew filling
potholes on Cleveland’s east side focuses less on picking the best player
available and more on filling the roles imagined by a rookie head coach that no
one wanted initially, everyone and I mean everyone should see that for the red
flag that it is.

Does that mean Gilbert was a mistake?That can’t be judged specifically.It’s more the process of his selection that
should worry the fans.

Farmer now enters the second day of the draft knowing that
he did well on the first part of a multi-part exam.But he can’t coast.The rest of the exam awaits.The reason the Browns are the Browns isn’t
just that they made horrific first round selections.It’s because they also made awful selections
in most other parts of previous drafts as well.

Coaches like to say that defense wins championships, but
that’s only half right.What matters
just as much if not more in the NFL is depth.It’s great to have a shut down corner like Joe Haden, for example, but
when he was out the drop off was precipitous.No team can have two deep Pro Bowlers at any position but what’s
hindered the Browns even more than a lack of a quarterback is the fact that the
fall off between its starters and its backups is probably greater than that of
any team in the league.Indeed, most of
the Browns’ starters would be the backups on other teams.When a starter goes down in Cleveland they’re
filling it with a guy that wouldn’t likely be on most teams’ rosters.

Let’s see how the rest of the draft turns out.It’s off to an interesting, intriguing
start.And let’s recognize, too, how genuinely
nice it was to see Browns fans celebrate the drafting of Manziel particularly
after it looked like the worst thing in the world had just happened to them,
they weren’t getting what they wanted.But remember that if not getting what you want is the worst thing in the
world, the second worst is getting what you wanted.Now that’s a theme Browns fans should be able
to rally around.

Friday, May 02, 2014

You know it’s been a historic week in racism when the number
two story involves a guy who started off his rant with the phrase “and let me
tell you another thing I know about the Negro.”

That Donald Sterling, the soon-to-be former owner of the
L.A. Clippers could somehow eclipse serial criminal, Fox News folk hero and
clueless racist Cliven Bundy says something about how deep the spirit of racism
remains entrenched at least in some of this country’s population.

And despite near unanimous (I’d say unanimous but the far
right never completely disappoints) condemnation of both Bundy’s and Sterling’s
words, the backlash with respect to the punishment has begun.

No one, especially politicians and hatemongers like Sean
Hannity, have resurrected Bundy’s criminal enterprise to further their war on
the country’s first black president.I
suspect no one of import will get back into bed with him.But when it comes to unrepentant cheater and
racist Sterling, we’ve now entered the backlash phase.

On Tuesday, a mere three days after Sterling’s private
conversations blanketed the airwaves, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver came down
hard.He banned Sterling from the NBA
for life and said he’d work to force a sale of his team.For good measure, he fined Sterling $2.5
million on his way out the door.

The severity of the punishment has seemed to oddly work in
Sterling’s favor, at least for a few contrarians and, surprisingly, not all of
them camping out on the far right fringe of polite society.

To this point, the alternate perspective has fallen
generally into one of two categories: privacy and freedom. The sound had barely
left the auditorium where Silver announced the penalties when questions began
to arise about not just the severity of the penalties but what the incident itself
says about us as a country.

Jason Whitlock, writing for ESPN, took a thoughtful if
nonsensical contrarian approach.While
not defending Sterling’s words, he did raise questions about punishing someone,
including a racist like Sterling, for private thoughts uttered behind closed
doors to his mistress.Fair enough even
though those supposedly private words were heard by so many so often in the
last week that more people can quote them than the first amendment to the
Constitution.

He then raised questions about the apparent mob rule that
seemed to mandate Silver’s decision, noting the dangerousness of merely
responding to throngs that tend to act more on emotion than intelligence.Again, fair enough even if he didn’t
acknowledge that sometimes the mob gets things right.But where Whitlock stopped making sense was
when he advanced a theory backed by nothing empirical let alone thoughtful that
Sterling’s penalty did nothing to solve the greater issue of the culture that
informed Sterling’s world view in the first place, not to mention the greater
issue of advancing the cause of blacks generally.

Whitlock is wrong.The punishment that Silver administered strikes exactly at the core of
the culture that created a racist like Sterling in the first place.Sterling lives in a bubble of his own
making.A line was crossed, probably
decades ago, by Sterling when he came to believe that his business success gave
him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted and without consequence.And Sterling certainly lived out that life.He cheated on his wife openly.He discriminated against potential minority
tenants in his housing projects, again openly.Indeed Sterling conducted his life so outside of what most would
consider normal that his life to most appeared to be a caricature.

The problem is, the standards by which he’s being judged are
the thoughts of most of us because most of us don’t live in that bubble.In Sterling’s bubble, he was just fine, the
life of the party really.Sterling’s
past actions, fed by an almost complete lack of attaching consequences, fed, as
Whitlock suggests, an insidious culture.But where Whitlock is wrong is that heavy handed punishments often can
and often do shake the status quo of those cultures in fundamental ways.I still recall a debate from my college days
about the seminal Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education in
which the concept of separate but equal was struck down.The professor asked whether a simple Supreme
Court decision would have any real impact.As students we questioned the value of the rule of law in fostering
significant cultural change with opinions varied on its effectiveness.

History has more than demonstrated that impact of that
simple Supreme Court decision.It
created a sea change in the rights of blacks, changes that many whites are
still fighting to this day.Nonetheless
what it did most was change our views, made most of us see the folly and
ridiculousness of treating people differently simple because of the color of
their skin.

Here, the power of Silver’s penalties can have a similar
effect.While blatant racism isn’t the
problem it was in 1954, it’s still wildly prevalent no matter what the Wall
Street Journal editorial board may think or how often the overwhelmingly
predominately white far right claim it’s not.On the same day Silver punished Sterling, a Wisconsin federal court
struck down a voter identification law in Wisconsin put in place by a far right
governor and legislature because while not fixing a problem that doesn’t exist
in the first place (voter fraud) the law had a very detrimental effect on the minorities
and the poor whose votes they were intentionally trying to suppress.It was the second court to strike down the
law.

The point is that racism may not be as open as it was in the
1950s when blacks had to use separate water fountains, but it exists and in
very serious forms still.The Sterling
punishment is a very loud shot across the bow of the white establishment that
it is no longer business as usual.If
the lesson learned is that not even private conversations are safe, then so be
it.Sterling’s private racism demonstrated
him to be a public phony and ultimately a public racist.

When an essentially private club like the NBA, dependent on
the public for its very existence, takes action in that public interest,
whether informed by emotion, intelligence or both, it does have an effect.It sends a message to owners in every sport,
in every corporation, that their words have consequences and will be punished. Those
in power do have a greater responsibility and as they clean up their act,
whether forced by the severe consequences given to Sterling or simply because
it’s the right thing to do, society as a whole is better off, more advanced.

Which leads to my second point, the presence of that free
market that the right and the extreme right in particular seem to believe cures
all ills.It certainly did in this case
and yet it’s those same advocates that are now having the most trouble with
what happened to Sterling.

While Whitlock was being thoughtful, others not so
much.On the local front, the media’s
biggest troll and lightest intellectual, Mike Trivisonno, used his platform at
an increasingly irrelevant AM radio station that serves as the flagship sports
station in town to rail on about how Sterling’s punishment is still another
example of how our freedoms in this country are under attack.

The problem with jackasses like Trivisonno is not just their
inability to process higher order concepts but also their rather simplistic
view that freedom is threatened every time responsibility attaches.

Trivisonno decried, simply decried, the influence that
various sponsors of the L.A. Clippers had on the punishment handed out to
Sterling.Sponsors pulled their dollars
from the Clippers, sending a message to the NBA at the same time that similar
actions could follow if Silver didn’t take sever action.And it certainly it fair to suggest Silver’s
actions were highly informed by the economic impact that could befall the
league if he didn’t punish Sterling severely.But so what?Isn’t that just the
free market at work?

Trivisonno was likely speaking from a more personal standpoint
on this issue anyway.As a media
provocateur, to be polite, or as an ill-informed nitwit, to be more accurate,
Trivisonno’s opinions have likely drawn the ire of his show’s sponsors and that
seems to chafe in ways that probably clipped off the even more strident views
he’d prefer to express.Again, though,
that’s just the free market at work.

No one holds a gun to the heads of any sponsor to advertise
and no one holds a gun to the heads of any team or league to accept that
advertisement.The sponsors who pulled
their advertising with the Clippers were maybe slightly motivated by moral
concerns but were overwhelmingly motivated by economic ones. They simply didn’t want anyone to associate
their product or service with an avowed racist like Sterling.It’s really the same thing that happened when
Tiger Woods lost all his sponsors when the revelations about his sordid
personal life became public.Most
companies not named Nike are concerned about the impact to their bottom line
when people thing negatively about their product.

About 76% of the players in the NBA are black.The NBA courts and counts a large black fan
base.Being sensitive to their concerns
just makes economic sense to the sponsors who back the league.

Sterling’s freedom wasn’t at all impacted by the punishment
Silver laid out any more than it was impacted by the multimillion dollar
settlement he paid to resolve discrimination claims years ago.He can and probably still will have the
occasional private rant about the blacks he either cannot stand or
understand.What is impacted is his
ability to conduct business inside the private confines of the NBA with people
that don’t relate well to his thinking.That is just the free market talking loudly and proudly.

Freedom isn’t a catchword for irresponsibility.Simply because you can say it doesn’t mean
you should.Words and actions do have
consequences.Sometimes they get you
into legal trouble.Sometimes they get
you in business trouble.Sometimes they
get you punched in the nose.And in none
of those situations is our freedom at all impacted.

Much of the criticism of Silver that falls into the bucket
represented by Trivisonno is really a criticism of what they believe to be
political correctness gone amok.Denouncing racism is just correct.There’s nothing political about it.

The real movement we
have in this country is being initiated by the Freedom Police, a weird band of
off- thinking wingnuts who seem to think that any infringement on their ability
to do what they want when they want and to whomever they want is tantamount to the
oppression the colonists felt at the hands of the British.

As the fictitious president Andrew Shepard said in The
American President, America is advanced citizenship.We’re a country built not just on freedom as
an amorphous concept but responsible freedom exercised by people with a sense
larger than themselves.We can and
should put limits on absolute freedom because your right to do whatever you
want exactly ends at the point on which it infringes on my right to be left
alone.There’s a reason shouting “fire”
in a crowded theater is punishable and not an infringement on freedom.There’s a reason that libel and slander are
actionable.

Sterling may have been exercising his freedom of thought but
the moment it impacted on his fellow owners and their ability to conduct their
business, the moment it impacted on the league’s black players and their
ability to work in a discrimination free environment, that ability to act
irresponsibly and without consequence ended.That’s as it should be and as it’s always been.

So please spare me the sanctimony of the contrarians like
Whitlock who believe private words and thoughts shouldn’t matter.Spare me too the ill-conceived logic of jerks
like Trivisonno who only imagine a life lived without consequence, as if that’s
ever existed.Sterling got what the populace
and the market dictated.He got what he
deserved, finally.